BuycPanel Blog

7/28/2015 – How Do I Expand My cPanel Bandwidth?

Posted by Jamison on 28 07 2015.

A bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred and received over a specific period of time. It includes data transmitted in categories below:

HTTP – browser traffic

FTP – file transfers

SMTP – email sent

POP3 / IMAP – email received

When nearing your bandwidth limit, cPanel will send you a “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” email notification warning stating you have reached 80%, 90% or 95% of your allowance. With this warning, you may want to check where most of your usage is coming from. You may do this through “bandwidth usage.” Your high usage may come from a spike in http traffic or an email (IMAP) traffic.

How do I view my bandwidth information and usage?

You can determine which category of your Bandwidth takes up most of your limit via Bandwidth interface. It will also show you the heaviest traffic times so you can monitor your server activities during your server’s busiest period.

You can view transmitted data on a daily transfer, on a Past 7 Days rate arranged into five-minute intervals, or on a larger scale of one year via Past 12 Months graph. The Past 12 Months graph will show you the amount of data transferred for over a year on a per month interval. With this large scale information, it will help you decide the seasonality of the burst of your server traffic.

But before you expand your bandwidth, you would want to know the bandwidth limit of your accounts first.

To view the bandwidth usage and limit of your accounts, simply go to “View Bandwidth Usage” under ”Account Information” of your cPanel interface. This will show you a list displaying data on the consumed bandwidth of the main domain of your account vis-à-vis the limit of consumption of the particular account. To help you visually, it also displays the percentage of consumed bandwidth allocated to the account.

Accounts that host video content naturally consume more bandwidth than an account that hosts only a blog. If the high usage of your server account is reasonable, you can adjust your account’s bandwidth limit by following the steps below:

STEP 1: Log in to your cPanel.

STEP 2: Click “Account Functions.”

STEP 3: Select “Limit Bandwidth Usage.” This will help you manage the bandwidth limit of your accounts.

STEP 4: The interface will display the list of accounts on your server. Select the account you wish to modify. Click Limit.

STEP 5: Input the adjusted bandwidth limit for the particular account in the text box.

STEP 6: Click Change. Take note that changes you make to your accounts’ bandwidth limit will take effect only between midnight to 6:00 am as the cPanel system only checks bandwidth limits within this period.

If you have no issues in the usage of your accounts or the traffic of your website but wish to expand your total limit nevertheless, you can already consider upgrading your hosting package.